


Counting Your Face Among the Living

by Siobhan_Schuyler



Category: Cobra Starship, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Apocalypse, M/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-05
Updated: 2008-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-19 06:29:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siobhan_Schuyler/pseuds/Siobhan_Schuyler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Burying Gabe is a bitch.</p><p>Alex spends two hours digging a rectangle, six feet deep and half as wide, into the tightly-packed earth outside a CitiBank in Pennsylvania. He works up a sweat despite the cold, his shirt sticking to his back as he pats down the last of the loose dirt atop Gabe’s grave with the back of the shovel. Hoping, maybe, to make up for the botched job he did with Nate and Victoria the week before. Dumped into the same hastily-dug grave under an Exxon billboard off Route 4, the low sun and long shadows making Alex sloppy.</p><p>He clings to the fact that Victoria’s eyes and the twisted curve of Nate’s back hadn’t looked all that reproachful. That maybe they would’ve done the same for (to?) him.</p><p>Ryland wasn't nearly as much trouble, once Alex lopped his head off, along with half a shoulder. He's lying in a five-foot-something hole in the ground somewhere in Rhode Island. There’s just a point where geography ceases to matter.</p><p>Jon Walker hasn't been so lucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting Your Face Among the Living

**Author's Note:**

> Part of a songficlets meme. For ignipes, who asked for this pairing and ended up picking MCR's Early Sunsets Over Monroeville which is about Dawn of the Dead and/or your loved one turning into a zombie and you having to kill it. IDK, IT'S GERARD WAY, HE'S ACTION-PACKED WITH ISSUES. ♥

Burying Gabe is a _bitch._

Alex spends two hours digging a rectangle, six feet deep and half as wide, into the tightly-packed earth outside a CitiBank in Pennsylvania. He works up a sweat despite the cold, his shirt sticking to his back as he pats down the last of the loose dirt atop Gabe’s grave with the back of the shovel. Hoping, maybe, to make up for the botched job he did with Nate and Victoria the week before. Dumped into the same hastily-dug grave under an Exxon billboard off Route 4, the low sun and long shadows making Alex sloppy.

He clings to the fact that Victoria’s eyes and the twisted curve of Nate’s back hadn’t looked all that reproachful. That maybe they would’ve done the same for (to?) him.

Ryland wasn't nearly as much trouble, once Alex lopped his head off, along with half a shoulder. He's lying in a five-foot-something hole in the ground somewhere in Rhode Island. There’s just a point where geography ceases to matter.

Jon Walker hasn't been so lucky.

Alex drops the shovel and wipes his hands on the thighs of his jeans. Twenty yards out and with his back to Alex, Jon is standing with his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. Alex can tell by the bunching of Jon’s shoulders under his hoodie.

“Hey,” Alex calls out. He runs his forearm over his face and feels every grain of dirt that turn to mud on his skin. Jon just looks tired when he turns around, sandals scratching at the parking lot pavement, his arms fallen to his sides, useless, unstained. From where Alex is standing, Jon is perfectly bracketed by two yellow lines, like a ditched car.

Jon’s band is still out there, no longer themselves but too cunning, somehow, to be caught and slaughtered for their own sake--and Jon’s. Alex thinks he saw Brendon briefly in Secaucus, when he and Jon were busy looting a Starbucks for stale cookies. The smell of sour milk was overpowering the stench of rotting flesh, and Alex just watched Brendon amble out of sight, his gait all wrong, broken and predatory. He didn't tell Jon, who had his head in a cupboard, rummaging. Alex picked his way through a gnarled mess of green aprons and went to help him instead.

These days, they're in no hurry. They’ve run out of places to go to, of people to check up on. They’ve run out of people, period.

They make Terre Haute, Indiana, by seven that night, and break into the office of a Super 8 to grab a set of keys at random. Room 17 is musty but clean, eerily still in the semi-dark, curtains pulled against the coming sundown. Movies say day or night doesn’t matter to the dead, but they found out that movies were wrong about that, too. Jon's taken to resting the backs of chairs against doorknobs, as if that'll keep anything out. Alex suspects Jon takes more comfort in the ritual of it than anything else.

The water is still running so Alex showers the day’s blood and sweat off his skin, rubs soap into his hair, scratches at the stubble under his jaw with his last bright orange Bic. His hands stopped shaking around the slivers of motel soap three or four states ago.

When he comes back out, dressed and towelling his hair dry, Jon is looking out past the curtains, picking at his cuticles, curled up in the chair not set against the door. His hands are never still anymore, even when the rest of him is, and his eyes never settle on anything but the road ahead, the next corner, the horizon. Waiting. Alex keeps an unused blade sharp for him, just in case.

Alex takes the bed farthest from the door and falls asleep on top of the covers, with his glasses still on.

It's dark out when he wakes up again, briefly, as the mattress creaks and dips and his shoulder connects with another. It's still there when he comes to again to a roomful of filtered sunlight, hours later. Jon is awake, but his thousand yard stare connected with Alex’s face sometime during the night, and Alex only has to pull at the front of Jon’s shirt. Jon’s beard is at least three weeks old, rough against Alex’s chin, clumsy like the dig of his frames into Jon's cheek. Alex moans into the kiss when Jon’s hand work the buttons of his fly open. It always surprises him how fast he spills in Jon’s hand, every time, pulse hammering in counterpoint to the damp puffs of Jon's breath against his neck.

When he reaches for Jon’s belt, Jon pushes his hand away wordlessly and slips out of bed, padding barefoot back to his post by the window. Alex, still breathing hard, watches him, then goes to clean himself up.

In the car later, Alex dumps a creased map in Jon’s lap, and the sharp, unused blade on top of it. Jon hesitates, then wraps his fingers around the handle, two-handed, his grip white-knuckled.


End file.
